wierd syphon issue

I bottled my blonde ale tonight and had a weird issue when trying to start a syphon. I filled my siphon hose and bottle filler with water, attached it to my racking cane, opened the clip on my hose and let the water go. I got a syphon going but I had a huge air pocket form near the top of the hose and my bottles were filling extremely slowly. I tried a couple more times with the same issue. My wife pointed out that I had never filled my bottle filler with water before, so I reluctantly started over with water in my syphon hose only, opened the clip and got a perfect syphon. I'm extremely perplexed as to why this happened and was curious if this has happened to anyone else before.

I kinda think that Cheeto might have a better answer than me...BUT:
When this happens to me, I just thump the bubble with my finger and it usually dislodges and passes through the hose.

BigKahuna said:

When this happens to me, I just thump the bubble with my finger and it usually dislodges and passes through the hose.

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This was much more that just a bubble though. I'd say the top third of my syphon hose was empty, and just enough beer was being sucked through to very slowly fill the bottles. I think theres something to having my bottle filler empty when starting my syphon, because that has worked every time.

I try to get a completely full siphon line before I start, I have a "tester" bottle for the first run out of my cane, and if I don't get a full line I try to "thump" the line and cane while holding the line above the air bubble in an attempt to get it out of my racking system

if all else fails I do start over ! !!!!!

I hope this works for you

Cheeto1977 said:

I try to get a completely full siphon line before I start, I have a "tester" bottle for the first run out of my cane, and if I don't get a full line I try to "thump" the line and cane while holding the line above the air bubble in an attempt to get it out of my racking system

if all else fails I do start over ! !!!!!

I hope this works for you

Click to expand...

What's weird is that I've bottled a fair amount of beer and never had this issue before. I've always completely filled my syphon hose, attached it to my racking cane and then my empty bottle filler, and then pushed the end of my filler into a bucket until all of the water is out and my syphon is started. Tonight I decided to put water in my filler also before attaching it to my hose, and that had some sort of negative affect on my syphon. I'm sure that was the cause, and I'm not going to do it again, I'm just confused as to why.

try having your hose attched to your cane

my auto-siphon gets a big air-pocket where the hose attaches to the cane. I just pinch it a few times and it burps out.

That's one of the reasons I love the autosiphon - get an air bubble at the top and you just give it a pump and it's gone.